Friday, July 06, 2007

Book Review: The Art & Science of CSS

The Art & Science of CSS, Cameron Adams, et. al.  Published by sitepoint, ISBN 0–9758419–7–1

This is really another amazing book from sitepoint which has been putting out a great line of web design/standards/crafting books.  I loved The Principles of Beautiful Web Design (review here) and James has spoken very highly of HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS.  This book seems to follow right along the same bent: concise, well-written content at exactly the right level of detail to convey the point the authors are working on at the moment.

Art & Science won’t teach you the fundamentals of flow, divs, spans, or even CSS basics like classes and IDs; however, the progress through the book is so well-paced and clear that you’ll be able to fill in any gaps in your knowledge as you read along.

The book has seven chapters, each on a specific aspect of CSS such as Headings, Images, or Navigation.  The chapters lay out basic premises of the topic, such as how you want to think about your headings as part of a page/site’s branding and impact, then move on to details of creating and implementing a beautiful design.  Each chapter makes its points in small, incremental steps such as starting off with basic vertical navigation, progressing to more advanced horizontal such as navigation with hover/current location changes, then finishes up with advanced concepts like matrixing menu images so you can show complex combinations simply by dealing with positioning.

All of this is accomplished in a style and depth of content that’s applicable to folks with rudimentary design/CSS skills (i.e. yours truely) as well as accomplished web designers.  What really amazes me is that the authors hit such a broad audience (and did it well!), covered a broad range of topics in detail, and pulled it all off in just over 200 pages.  (And those pages, by the way, are glorious full color.)

This is a great book for learning how to deal with CSS in an elegant, well-architected fashion.  It’s simply a terrific book if you’re doing anything at all with CSS.

Now Playing: Mike Farris — Salvation in Lights.  Holy smokes, this is some amazing stuff.  Farris used to front for Double Trouble for a bit and this album’s right along that style, except that it’s Americana/Gospel.  Farris has an amazing, HUGE voice and the band behind him tosses out great tunes to back him up.

4 comments:

Term Papers said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Term Papers said...

Science is a very interesting field if we work with full dedication.

Detroit hotel deals said...

Interesting Article. I will forward this to my friends! Thank you for sharing it with us.

paulsmith198914@gmail.com said...

"The Art & Science of CSS" is an interesting article. Moreover, thank you for sharing this book overview with others - hope that writing a custom paper will be much simplified!

Subscribe (RSS)

The Leadership Journey